Belonging and Otherness: The Violability and Complicity of Settler Colonial Sexual Violence

Abstract

In this article, I problematize sexual violence as a gendered and raced tool of colonial dominance. Though the theoretical framework of settler colonialism, I demonstrate how colonialism in the United States influences current discourse and policy around sexual violence. First, I explore the ways that colonialism positions women as victims and chattel of men. Secondly, I consider why White women who are positioned thusly lean into the male dominance which disenfranchises them, thereby further disenfranchising other-embodied persons. Moving between a historical and contemporary review, I merge empirical and anecdotal evidence to make clear that sexual violence is the rule, not the exception. To conclude, liberation focused therapy and digital feminism is discussed for therapists who wish to confront the colonial forces that obfuscate the conditions under which sexual violence is produced.

Keywords:

• Race and gender
• Settler colonial theory
• sexual violence

Acknowledgments

The University of Arkansas was founded on Indigenous land where many Nations and peoples created sacred legacies. I respectfully acknowledge the Osage, Caddo, and Quapaw Nations, who were forced to leave these ancestral lands, and the Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations, who on the Trail of Tears, were forced to travel through what is the university’s campus today. Hara ahau i te tangata mohio ki te korero otira e tika ana kia mihi atu kia mihi mai.

Notes

1 Latin expression meaning “nobody’s land”.

2 French feminist Cixous et al. (1976) devised écriture féminine (women’s writing) as a departure from androcentric and anglocentric literature, writing, “woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies” (p. 875).